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Back to reality. Read TFA again.

Don't confuse the board members with other members of their C-suite.

Still, how is that even legal is astounding, feels very fraudulent, and the last guy I want to defend is the CEO of WP after all the drama he created over it.

A breach of fiduciary duty" describes Matt's behavior through all his escapades here. Minority shareholder rights are a thing, it just seems there are no minority shareholders willing enough to deal with Matt's nonsense to fight for it.

If there is any litigation, it opens Matt up to liability for the same thing. Unfortunately, as we've seen, Matt is willing to self-destruct himself and the company if it would effect sufficient self-glorification for him.

Can you tell me where you see Matt has 84% voting control?

I thought the reporting on this (at least in TechCrunch) was downright bizarre. The only thing that ever mattered was who had voting control, and I couldn't see anywhere that this was reported in TechCrunch. I can't even fathom how the other board members thought they could oust Matt if he had majority control. None of this makes any sense to me.

Edit: I see the 84% number further down in the article. Still, that makes this make even less sense to me. How could the other board members vote out Matt as CEO with only a minority vote?

yeah, because as we know, Corporations are all about ... giving

fiduciary to whom? everyone who invested in the company knew they were buying in to something where one person controlled it.

What were they supposed to do? If you’ve been following Mullenweg’s behavior, he’s clearly unstable, and while this is admittedly armchair diagnosis, a lot of his recent writing gives me strong stimulant psychosis vibes. Granted maybe you shouldn’t take a job as a board member at a company where the CEO has 83% of voting shares to begin with, but once you’re there, you still have a fiduciary duty to do what’s best for the company, so IMO they were obligated to at least try and eject him.

If they can see that Mullenweg has lost it completely and beyond their ability to influence, and they also know that he’s a tyrant who would happily screw them, this seems like a fairly rational exit.

Obviously that may not be the case, but when the captain is steering the ship into rocks over and over the crew is going to take what they can and hit the lifeboats.

Ed sp

That's. That's just not how contracts for severance packages work.

I'm not familiar with this case but most severance packages I've dealt with are valid for everything except like death or federal prison.

Deciding to not use Wordpress isn’t that hard though

I don’t think that’s been true for 10 years or more.

I wonder where you think where all these people would left to? I can think of project or two but it's very short list.

WC is quite feature rich and has many payment gateways. It's also owned by Automattic and locks things like the richest subscription features behind paid plugins.

At least it's better than ZenCart.

What makes it hard, these days?

I did plenty of WP back in the day and I agree, historically, but each of the strong answers I had in my mind (db integration, editor, plugins, themes) are weakened substantially by the AI agents' ability to port a working site to a new framework. I totally agree for normal users still but for devs taking jobs on this do you think the barriers to switching have come down in size?

It certainly is. But I won't be recommending it for new projects. Imagine how bad that would make you look.

Have you heard of this thing called 4chan?

He's indignant that WP Engine is eating his market share and not giving anything back in terms of OSS contributions.

It's not at the same scale that AWS and GCP suffocate database vendors, but it rhymes. And it's easy to see why he's mad.

If a very vocal part of the OSS community wasn't so averse to letting small amounts of monopolization happen, we might see open source products that reach significant commercial scale. Where a single vendor or entity can profit and grow big without irrelevant competitors abusing the license to latch onto the product. An open source monopoly could collect good margin and build ambitiously.

It's hard to build a defensible open source business without using fair source licenses, having source available enterprise offerings, or even using an open core design that keeps important parts hidden and out of the commons. That's the only way to defend the magic bits and grow big.

If OSS folks were more tolerant of this, we'd probably see more funding for OSS and extremely viable and defensible open source businesses.

Who's a sociopath here? Is there evidence?

Why would they assume it's a temporary issue though? There's been drama around wordpress for years now, and almost all of it has been around the CEO.

Didn't they craft themselves a nice golden parachute if fired? Then proceeded to kick off events that would guarantee their dismissal?

That's less fiduciary duty and more hacking a payday.

Yeah the minority share holders can’t sue them for not trying to do their job even if it lead to them getting fired. (They could have quit too)

If they truly believe the CEO was destroying the company/its value.

It's an HDR image, I think.[0] At the moment, only some browsers show it as brighter—Firefox on macOS, for example, doesn't support HDR images and I had to open the page in Safari to see it for myself.

[0] see, for example, this submission from the front page a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49402521.

It's an 8-bit PNG of a magenta patch (with a dash of white), but the ICC profile is set to Rec.2020 PQ. So I think the high 255 values of 8-bit magenta/white will get mapped to very top of the PQ curve, which is like 10,000 nits (or whatever brightness your display can muster)

Automattic also isn't a public company.

I think many employees have hoped that it would IPO, but Mullenweg was already "post-economic" financially comfortable, and probably wasn't thrilled at giving up more control, or actually being subject to further scrutiny

Being on the board is a Sisyphean effort based on the weighted voting setup. Some seem to be slower to realize this. At that point, they could quit and walk away with nothing, or as others have suggested, this could have been done deliberately to at least get a payday on the way out.

So many people in this thread completely misunderstand what WP is being used for and by who. Most users simply have no idea that Automattic exists and probably wouldn’t care if they knew what’s going on.

WP users want a mature, easy to use framework, with lots of plugins, and a tutorial that can show you how to get anything done. Wordpress is the piece of software that kind of defines that genre. The fact that every host offers a Wordpress package seals the deal.

Will do